Diaspora

Achieving this union would require concentrating a modest amount of energy—two gigajoules, enough to melt a six-ton block of ice—into a volume as much smaller than that ice block as an atom was smaller than the observable universe. Wormholes produced by electron-electron splicing would be traversable only by fundamental particles, but splicing together a few billion of them would further widen the resulting wormhole, rather than lengthening it, enabling a moderately sophisticated nanomachine to pass through.

Gabriel had heard it rumored that the gleisners had considered the wormhole option, but elected to put it aside for the next few millennia. Building conventional interstellar spacecraft must have seemed trivial compared to the kind of technology it would take to tear open the portals to the stars scattered at their feet. Still, with 3,017 designs to choose from there had to be one within Carter-Zimmerman's reach, even if it took a thousand years to bring to fruition. Gabriel was undaunted by the time scale; he had long hoped for a grand scheme like this to make sense of his longevity. Without a purpose that spanned the centuries, he could only drift between interests and aesthetics, friends and lovers, triumphs and disappointments. He could only live a new life every gigatau or two, until there was no difference between his continued existence and his replacement by someone new.

Full of hope, he moved across the scape toward the first blueprint.

8

SHORT CUTS

Carter-Zimmerman polis, Earth

51 479 998 754 659 CST

7 August 3865, 14:52:31.813 UT

Blanca floated through the latest world ve'd grown from a novel symmetry group and a handful of recursion formulae. Giant inverted pyramids floated above ver, sprouting luminous outgrowths like rococo chandeliers. Feathery planar crystals swirled and grew around ver, then began to collide and merge into strange new objects, random acts of origami performed with diamond and emerald films. Below ver, a vast terrain of mountains and canyons was eroding in fast motion, carved by a blizzard of diffusion laws into glistening green and blue mesas, impossible overhangs, towering stratified sculptures veined with minerals unknown to chemistry.

In Konishi, ve would probably have called this "mathematics." In C-Z, it was necessary to call it "art," since anything else suggested a virtual universe in direct competition with the real one. Blanca had been dismayed to see the other polises sink back into complacency after the initial shock of carnevale, but ve still chafed against C-Z's growing orthodoxy when it proclaimed that to explore any system of rules that failed to illuminate the physics of reality amounted to pernicious solipsism. The beauty of the physical world had nothing to do with its power to harm that was just the dogma of the dead statics in another guise and everything to do with the simplicity and consistency of its laws. Blanca was unimpressed by claims that C-Z's physicists and engineers toiled only in the service of protecting the Coalition from the next dangerous cosmic surprise. It was the elegance of Kozuch Theory and the grandeur of the Forge itself that had kept them going; if either the guiding principles or the design had been the slightest bit uglier, they would have packed it in long ago.

Gabriel appeared beside ver, his fur dusted immediately with tiny crystals. Blanca reached over and brushed his shoulders affectionately; he responded by pressing a hand into the darkness of vis chest, inducing a gentle warmth throughout the whole invaded space. The places where Blanca's icon seemed to lose its tangible boundary were the most sensitive by far; they could be touched in three dimensions.

"We've had a neutralization in one ring." Gabriel seemed pleased, but nothing in his voice or gestalt betrayed the fact that the whole Forge group had been working toward this moment for the last eight centuries. Blanca nodded slightly, a gesture packed with warmth that only vis lover could have decoded.

Gabriel said, "Will you rush with me? Until confirmation?" He sounded slightly guilty to be asking.

The news would have just reached Earth that a positron in one of the Forge's magnetic storage rings had lost its charge and escaped into the surrounding laser trap, 65 hours ago. But it would take almost three more hours—ten megatau—for the crucial matching result from the second ring at the opposite end of the accelerator to arrive. Gabriel had lived through every similar delay tau-by-tau until now, patiently accepting the glacial slowness of manipulating matter on the hundred-terameter scale, but Blanca had certainly never seen it as some great moral principle.

"Why not?" They held hands in a cobalt blue snowdrift while their exoselves synched and slowed; the scape was synched directly to Blanca's mind, so it appeared to carry on at the same rate.